Cardiff Blitz Cities

AIR RAID SIRENS

This was Hitler's blitzkrieg, his "lightning war".

London endured 57 nights of bombing.

But then the Blitz spread,

devastating 16 cities in England, Scotland,

Wales and Northern Ireland.

So we're going to do now, as it were, a sort of dummy bombing run.

I'm John Humphrys

and I'm taking to the skies above my home city of Cardiff

to follow the flight paths of the Luftwaffe bombers.

What we're looking at now was just wiped out.

We had a direct hit and the bomb went right through the shop,

right through into the cellar and exploded.

I'll also fly over Swansea, where the "three nights Blitz"

destroyed its centre and changed the landscape for ever.

I'll see the reminders of the war,

meet those who lived through the bombings

and discover how they changed the face of our cities.

I was born in 1943, a war baby.

I came into a world ravaged by conflict

and into a city shattered by bombs.

The fighting and the fear would last for another two years.

This is the house where I was born,

193 Pearl Street,

the middle of five children.

I THINK I remember the bombs dropping.

Certainly, I learned about it later.

And I know what happened to us when the bombs did fall.

We were taken to the shop on the corner.

It's a house now, but it was a shop then, a chemist's shop.

Vivian Morgan's chemist shop.

And they had a cellar and that's where we took shelter.

And I was told afterwards that they put me in a cardboard box -

I was only a baby, after all -

and took me down to the cellar and there we were safe from the bombs.

Those bombs fell everywhere,

first causing carnage in London,

then throughout Britain.

Any city with strategic or economic importance

was on the Luftwaffe's target list.

And that meant Cardiff was near the top.

This port was the reason.

In the years before the war,

more coal passed through here than almost anywhere else in the world.

The docks were a vital part of the British economy.

The Germans wanted to destroy them.

They didn't succeed.

But they got perilously close.

On January 2nd, 1941,

around 100 of their planes took off from airfields in occupied France

heading directly for south Wales.

The pilots were highly focused, with clear targets in mind.

And the reason for that was simple - they'd done their research.

These are the tools of the trade, if you like.

These are the documents they took with them.

You've got the docks, you've got the steelworks...

Chris Going is an aerial archaeologist.

He has the reconnaissance photographs

the Nazis rather chillingly took even before the war started.

This is Cardiff and they have very clearly delineated the targets

that they were going, ultimately, to try to hit.

Erm, this one is labelled 45-61.

Now, 45 is the code for dock targets.

And Cardiff, for the Germans and for the German intelligence,

was the ports.

Hence, what we're seeing down here?

Exactly what you're seeing down there.

They are analysing and pulling apart very carefully

the dock facilities and so on.

Obviously, they've got the steelworks there.

And I have a particular interest in those steelworks

because my father was ordered to work in them during the war,

because he'd lost his sight as a young man, as a boy.

And they made people like him work in the steelworks.

Which is what he did. He was working there.

So he was a target.

Your father worked in target GB 7032.

-There we are.

-Hm...

And could easily have been one night under the aiming point.

-And I wouldn't have been here.

-And you wouldn't have been there.

-A sobering thought.

-Very chilling.

So, let's go to this picture, then.

And if I'm right...

and you can certainly tell me if I'm wrong,

my home, can't quite see the house, but that's Pearl Street.

That's Pearl Street.

Which is not that far from lots of targets,

which would explain, of course,

why many bombs dropped within the neighbourhood.

-We're talking about, what?

-One kilometre.

You're talking about three-quarters of a second of flying time, really.

Mm...

No wonder some of the bombs went astray.

Indeed, a lot of them went astray.

The Luftwaffe clearly had strong intelligence

and lots of accurate information

about the port and industrial targets.

So why did so many of their bombs drop on civilian homes?

I'm taking to the air to find out.

OK, everyone secure and happy?

Secure and happy, yep.

I'm following their flight path to see the city as they saw it.

It's fantastic visibility.

-Isn't it just?

-Wonderful.

So that's the Millennium Stadium.

And this is Cardiff Castle grounds.

Yep. I think it is there, just by the river.

It has to be.

There's the river.

So we're...

We're going to do now, as it were,

-a sort of dummy bombing run.

-Yep.

Because this is almost certainly how you'd have done it.

Looking at it now from this angle, Chris,

we can see the whole of the port over to the east.

It is so compressed, isn't it?

And you have so little time to get rid of your bombs.

-You have almost no time at all.

-Almost no time at all.

You've got Victorian streets just there, which are, you know...

And they've been completely cleared and replaced to the north of them.

Yeah, but they were very heavily populated.

-They were very heavily populated.

-Yep.

Erm, so this was the very reason why Cardiff was bombed,

all of the docks here.

You've got Queen Alexandra Dock just down below us,

which was a major aiming point.

But cheek by jowl, all of the workers' houses nearby,

which became targets, too.

What amazes me is that it looks so easy

when you're looking at a map, doesn't it?

You can imagine them sitting in Luftwaffe headquarters,

or whatever it was and, "Ah, yeah, we'll bomb that bit there

"and then we'll move on to bomb that bit there."

-But it ain't like that, is it?

-It ain't like that.

And what is cynically called collateral damage,

a lot of the sort of descriptions mask the reality of what this was.

And it was high explosives on civilians.

Well, I'm trying to imagine

that I'm flying a German bomber at this stage.

And we're flying now at about 160mph.

The Germans would have been flying a bit more than that,

about 200, 220.

We're at about 2,000 feet.

They were way above that, 4,000 or 5,000 feet,

maybe even more than that.

It's a beautiful sunny day.

But then, for them, of course, it was pitch dark.

And they had...

In fact, we're just over the docks now.

They would have had literally seconds to get rid of those bombs.

Seconds.

And now, even as I speak, we're away from the docks.

And we're into some fairly heavily populated areas.

A lot of houses down there.

And they've got to get rid of their bombs.

Demonstrates, yet again, the random nature of aerial war.

Where would they drop? Who knows...?

Like many people in south Wales,

my parents may have thought

they'd escaped the worst horrors of the Blitz.

By December 1940, the Nazi bombardment was four months old

and the number of raids over other cities had started to wane.

At Christmas, they stopped altogether.

It was indeed a time for peace.

But then came the New Year, a new wave of attacks and renewed terror.

Thursday, January 2nd, 1941 was cold and clear with a full moon,

a so-called bomber's moon,

providing near-perfect visibility.

Sirens wailed as the advance bombers appeared in the skies

above the Bristol Channel.

The first bombs fell at 6.37pm.

And more followed, for ten hours.

If you were in Cardiff on January 2nd, 1941,

you'd probably remember what happened that dreadful night.

If you were here in Grangetown,

on the corner of Corporation Road and Stockland Street,

those events would surely be seared into your memory.

This dockland neighbourhood was the first to be hit.

Then, as now, it was densely populated with family homes

and small businesses.

On this corner, a local shop, Hollyman's Bakery,

became the setting for the worst single incident

of the Cardiff Blitz.

I used to go in there and I used to give him a hand kneading the bread.

John Williams is 89 now.

In 1941, he was a teenage delivery boy, working with a horse and cart.

On January 2nd, he called by Hollyman's on his way home.

I'd been out on my round, I'd come back and they said,

"Oh, come in and have some soup before you go home."

So I went down the cellar with them and I had my soup.

But this night, Bill Hollyman said,

"There's a lot of air activity coming across today."

He said, "I think you'd better go home,

"because I think your mother and father might be worried."

You were 14 at the time?

I was 14. So I went home.

Tragically, many didn't.

When the sirens sounded, they took shelter in the bakery cellar.

It took a direct hit.

I went to work the next day, didn't know anything had happened.

I turned the corner

and it was all flat.

They were bringing out bodies wrapped up in sacks

and things like that.

But it was never ascertained how many people were down there.

But probably more than 30? Certainly more than 30?

Well, they said there was about 30.

Bill Hollyman, the man who owned the bakery,

he was down in the cellar with everybody else.

Him and his wife and his daughter

and one of his uncles and his sister.

And all the rest were people who got called down there.

Just neighbours, who were looking for somewhere to shelter?

That's right, yes.

So he thought, obviously, he was doing people a favour

by giving them shelter and they all got killed.

Oh, yes. Yes.

And what were you doing yourself

when the bombs were falling that night?

I was in an Anderson shelter with my mother and father

and my sister and brother.

In one of these Anderson shelters in 6 Devon Street.

And you could hear the bombs falling?

And we heard the bombs falling.

And we had a little, erm...

we had a gramophone in there.

We used to play records.

Oh, why do I come to think of it?

Were you not scared?

No.

Well, I mean, we went to work the next day.

Carry on with life, didn't you?

-But they weren't so lucky here, were they?

-No, they wasn't.

# I'm going to love you like nobody loved you

# Come rain or come shine... #

This photo shows the gap at the end of the row of houses

where the bakery once stood.

What strikes you so powerfully

about a story like John's

is the sheer random nature of aerial warfare.

If John had gone down into the shelter that night,

as he very well might have done,

he would have been one of those 30-odd people

who were blown to bits by that bomb.

Instead, he was in another shelter,

in another place,

listening to music...

..and lived to tell us about it today.

The bombing of Cardiff marked the start of a new phase in the Blitz.

Before January 1941, the Germans had targeted only English cities,

but now nowhere in the British Isles was safe.

For two nights in March, Clydebank near Glasgow -

home to munitions factories and shipyards -

came under intense attack.

More than 1,200 people were killed and as many injured.

The destruction was so great,

only seven properties in the town were left undamaged.

As a result, its population went from 60,000 to just 2,000.

The Irish Republic, which stayed neutral during the war,

was also hit.

'Houses at Rathdown Park, Dublin fall victims to Hitler's bombs.

'Seven people were trapped when the Nazi raiders

'deliberately unloaded their bombs on these houses in Eire.'

Then, over Easter,

its northern neighbour felt the full force of the Luftwaffe.

In Belfast, in April,

900 people were killed in one single night of bombing.

Meanwhile, back in my home city,

the bombing continued sporadically for weeks.

After more than a dozen raids,

countless buildings and many lives were in ruins.

But the Luftwaffe wasn't finished with south Wales.

They'd already selected another target 40 miles to the west.

They'd launched a few attacks.

Now they were to return with unexpected ferocity,

and with devastating results.

AIR RAID SIRENS

Like Cardiff, prewar Swansea was a crucial port,

and a centre for military-based industries.

So it was inevitable the city would appear on the Nazi hit list.

This image, which is, I think,

quite the most chilling graphic

you can possibly look at of Swansea,

shows just how dense the dock facilities were,

and how close-by the housing was.

And, literally, if you press the button

a second late, two seconds late, your bombs will...

-Yeah.

-..without any doubt,

have gone into the town.

And, indeed, the early attacks in February 1941,

effectively destroyed the city centre.

Mm.

They missed the docks.

They really did miss the docks.

That is extraordinary, isn't it?

And they flattened the city centre.

Viewed from the air, you can see why this place

was a sitting duck for the Luftwaffe bombers.

Even without any modern navigational aids,

the Germans would've had absolutely no trouble finding Swansea,

even at night,

because, of course, you just come up the Channel,

you stick to the coast, and there it is.

You've got the hills behind to tell you where the port is,

even if you can't see the actual dock buildings.

So...an easy target to find.

And, as we now know,

tragically, a very easy target

to cause massive, massive damage to.

Swansea was so badly hit.

All of the focus...

..is just that area enclosed by that outer breakwater there.

Yeah, that's it.

We can see it in one sweep, really, can't we?

Absolutely.

That's the entire old centre, isn't it?

Which was completely flattened.

Yes, exactly, what we're looking at now.

In Feb, '41, there were three attacks in so many days,

and they destroyed the city centre.

I shudder to think what those few days must've been like, eh?

Oh. Horrifying.

Just to give you an idea

of the concentrated nature of the bombing,

40 acres of Swansea town centre was flattened.

That is the most concentrated bit of bombing

of the war.

Between 19th and 21st February,

bombs fell for a total of 13 hours and 48 minutes.

They set whole districts ablaze.

This is the only known photograph taken during the three-night Blitz.

The attacks killed 230 people

and injured more than 400.

857 properties were destroyed, 11,000 damaged,

and 7,000 people were made homeless.

Elaine Kidwell was an air-raid warden

who lived through every moment.

We'd come running out and we'd be blowing our whistles and yelling.

The shelters were open, but we'd stand and say,

"Come on, come on," you know. "Get in there."

And, er, they were machine gunning

the balloons down,

because they were over the docks, you see.

And I remember running along Quay Parade for my life,

because the bullets were coming behind me, you know?

And then I dived into a doorway

and they went past! You know?

Then I heard a whistle going,

blowing frantically.

I rushed down the steps

and over to, erm...where the whistling was coming from

and when I got there - this is in Quay Parade -

there was a warden leaning over a body on the ground.

So I went up and he said, "This is for you."

He said, "You know what to do."

"Where is it?" He said, "I don't know. He's bleeding from somewhere."

Anyway, it was black, you see? You couldn't tell.

And I said...

The man, he was unconscious, thank goodness.

Anyway, I felt around, and where his leg was, there was nothing.

"What is...? Oh, God, blood. The leg's gone."

So I put a tourniquet on him now,

and put everything right and, any case, this ambulance came along,

which was really a van,

and he said to me, "All right?"

I said, "Yes." I said, "I'm fine."

"Right," he said. "Now, listen, now," he said.

"You've saved his life.

"All right, he hasn't got a leg, but he's going to live."

Anyway, he came to see me some years later.

And he said, "How in hell did you get through the Blitz

"because you were always out in it?"

"Well," I said. "I'd rather have been out than been in."

Because your imagination can...

when you're in and you've the banging and the banging.

When you're out, you can see what's happening, you know?

So, there we were.

Elaine was 17 when she became an air-raid warden,

the youngest in Britain.

She was a girl seeing things most of us would hope never to see.

There was one thing I haven't forgotten,

but I'm coming to terms, even though it's a long time ago.

I was coming off duty

and they were bringing the dead from where

there was a lot of casualties.

And in the back of this car, now,

I could see - the hood was down -

and I could see two little babies

in a white box like that.

And one was...

The little girl was lying like this.

And the little boy, who was a bit older,

had his arm on her, but he was dead, too.

And I still can't get over it.

But I'm not grieving,

and I'm glad that they both went together.

You know what I mean?

But the sight, the waste of it! You know?

It was so wicked.

RECORDING: 'Morning is breaking over Wales at war.'

The Swansea poet and writer Dylan Thomas,

who was haunted by the destruction of his home town.

'..but the terrible near war

'of England and Wales and her brothers and sisters...'

Thomas had been declared medically unfit for military service,

so he spent much of the war writing scripts

for government propaganda films.

'In the roaring cauldrons of the Swansea Valley, in the...'

Those who studied his life believe he was actually in Swansea

at the height of the Blitz.

There's testimony from a very close friend of his

who saw Dylan and his wife Caitlin

walking through the streets of bombed Swansea after the Blitz

in that February and Dylan turned to his friend and said,

"Our Swansea has died."

So parts of the town that he knew and loved,

and was so familiar with, had written about in his short stories,

were just flattened.

In a sense, what would one would love to see

is his chronicling of the terrible events of early 1941

here in Swansea.

But he didn't do that, did he? He wrote later.

That's right, it took him six years to absorb

those traumatic events of Swansea.

The destruction of the Swansea he knew and loved.

Return Journey was the great play that he wrote in 1947.

Yes, that's right. This is the original script.

-The actual broadcast script that he'd have read from?

-Yes.

He was very keen to get every detail right in this script,

to the extent that he checked the order of all the shops

that had been bombed to make sure

that he had them in the correct order

when he was writing about them in this piece.

'Burton Tailors, WH Smith, Boots Cash Chemist, Lesley's Stores,

'Upson's Shoes, Prince of Wales, Tucker's Fish, Stead and Simpson...

'All the shops bombed and vanished.'

He even wrote to a former grammar school master of his

to get the names of those former boys who'd died in the war

who were on the roll of honour

so he could include their names in this broadcast.

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

'Evans, KJ. Haynes, GC. Roberts, IL.'

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

'Moxham, J. Thomas, H. Baines, W.'

And it's not an attempt to put a gloss on what happened

in any sense at all.

It is not lyrical in that sense, is it?

-In fact it is brutally truthful.

-Yes.

But there is... Well, there's a beauty in it.

Yes, it's an elegy. A very beautiful elegy, I think,

to a lost Swansea, a lost childhood,

which resonated with so many people.

'It was a cold, white day in the high street

'and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the docks,

'for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea,

'lay their blitzed-flat graves marbled with snow

'and headstoned with fences.'

It's a very, very long time since Dylan Thomas wrote that play -

he was in his 30s then -

and, obviously, nothing that he describes is as it was then.

This is the new Swansea.

None of the old remains.

But his words remain, and they are as colourful and evocative today

as they were when he wrote them.

Let's give you another flavour of it.

"Boys romped calling high and clear

"on top of a levelled chemist's and a shoe shop..."

THOMAS ON RECORDING: '..and a little girl wearing a man's cap

'threw a snowball in a chill, deserted garden

'that had once been the Jug and Bottle of the Prince of Wales.

'And in the falling winter morning

'I walked on through the white centre

'past the hole in space where Hodges the clothiers had been,

'down Castle Street past the remembered invisible shops -

'David Evans, Gregory Confectioners...

'Burton's, Lloyds Bank and nothing.'

But what the bombs and the flames never killed

was the spirit of the locals.

It survived.

And the place itself was rebuilt.

The centre is now full of tall buildings,

unrecognisable from what it was before the war.

Despite all the careful preparation and planning and boasting,

Hitler's "lightning war" failed to break Britain.

I know now just how close his pilots came to dropping a bomb on my house,

yet it, like the people and the nation,

stood firm against the onslaught.

You get a slightly different perspective

when you are looking down on it

and you see it there, this little clump of houses,

secure, safe.

It's, er...

It's quite a reassuring feeling, in a way, to know that

they're still there.

Back on the ground in Splott,

the bombsites that were once my forbidden playgrounds

are long gone.

In their places, family homes for the next generation.

Childhood produces a million false memories,

and, of course, I was a baby when the bombs were actually falling,

so it's been fascinating to talk to people who were older

and who really do remember

what it was like when the bombs were dropping.

What I remember, and this is a real memory,

is playing on the bombsites.

They were all around here

where the bombs dropped on these streets

and so there'd be that gap

and the house would be utterly destroyed.

And now, well, the streets are back to normal,

the houses are painted a little more brightly than they were then...

..and things have changed.

Everything has changed.

Our memories, though,

for those who really can remember,

are vivid.